KDE releases Christmas preview of KOffice

The KDE Project has announced the release of a special Christmas preview of KOffice 1.3, a free set of office applications that integrate with the KDE desktop, a media release says.

KDE is Open Source graphical desktop environment for Unix workstations. The preview version can be downloaded here.

KOffice uses free and open standards for its document formats, component communication and component embedding, and provides a number of filters to interoperate with other popular office suites.

The official version of KOffice 1.3 will be released next month. It will have improved support for non-KOffice document formats such as Microsoft Word and OpenOffice, the Kivio flow-charting application and the Kugar report generating tool.

The suite's word processor, KWord, can now open and change PDF documents. More than 500 reported issues have been corrected since the KOffice 1.2 release last year and many new features have been added.